7QT: March for Life, Run for Life, Patriots for Life

It's a (barely) snowy Friday morning here - we've had such a nice dry winter, I can't complain at all, plus it's Friday and the Patriots are in the playoffs this weekend, so Colleen's a happy girl! 

Why you gotta talk about yourself in the third person, Colleen?

That's a good question, Colleen.  I'll get back to you.

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My three oldest babies are marching for life today!!

Tidying Up with Marie Kondo - What I Love, What I Like, and What I Can't Get on Board With

In light of the Netflix show, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, I thought I would repost this article I wrote a few years back.  I loved reading this book and applied changes to our house immediately.  The new show makes me like the author even more - she is so cute and joyful - and is inspiring me to go through my home again.   I am planning to start the process (though on a much smaller scale!) on our first snow day, yay! My family is so excited ;)  Here is the original post in it's entirety....

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So if you're like me from last week, you don't know what the KonMari Method is.  You've never heard of this bestselling book that seriously is changing people's lives.

Isn't the author, Marie Kondo so beautiful?  Doesn't her living room look so peaceful and uncluttered behind her?  The tidying method she explains in her book is called the KonMari method, which is a play on her own name.  Get it?

We are beginning the process of seriously trying to sell our house.  We have a realtor coming over at the end of the month, and we have been saying that we need to get the house ready but have lacked the major motivation needed to do any work.  Six kids and sick kids can do that to the best laid plans.  So there I was, in the middle of Lent, feeling overwhelmed at the thought of getting my house ready to sell and keeping it ready to show.  

Book, Cook, Look - January 2019

Here's what I'm reading, eating, and wearing this month...

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For Christmas, I received Rachel Balducci's book, Make My Life Simple, and loved it as much as I love the author herself.  Rachel's newest book is part FlyLady, part Marie Kondo, part spiritual director, and 100% real.  She gives good, practical tips on how to simplify your life in all areas, while sharing bits and pieces of her own journey and struggle.  

Rachel doesn't know this, but she helped me with my laundry game years ago, when she blogged about her system.  It's how we've been doing it at the Martin Casa for a long time now, and it actually did make me like laundry a little better.  Not quite as much as Rachel, but she has her own kind of crazy :)  

A new tip that Rachel shared was about self-care being worth our time because it actually saves us time in the future.  She explains how just making time to get her eyebrows waxed reduces all the worry and work put into trying to make them look ok every day.  Once you just get it done, you can move on and focus on the bigger important things in life, but if you keep putting it off, it's actually draining your energy every day.  Makes total sense, and fits in with my Dad's motto of "For all the time you've spent complaining about doing it, you could have already gotten it done!"  Life lesson right there.  

So go ahead and get yourself this little gem of a book, it's a quick read full of lovely advice on the importance of destressing and simplifying our lives as much as possible.  Good work, Rach!

7QT: Blogs, Sex, and Taxes...Oh My!

Happy 2019!! Linking up with Kelly for Seven Quick Takes Friday....

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Happy Birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear blog, happy birthday to you!

 I hope to keep blogging through this year, as it will be 11 whole years this month that I've typed our family's memories in this little space.  Each year I make a book from this blog, and hopefully one day my kids will appreciate the yearly "scrapbooks" their mom took the time to create.  Or at least they can pull it out for the therapist to explain exactly how I ruined them ;)

Seasonal Goodness: Christmas 2018

Happy New Year!!  I've been meaning to post all the photos from our past week off and was having too much fun enjoying life to stop to document it.  But today is a no-plans-until-3pm kinda day, and so here I am recapping the end of 2018 for the old blog book.

I had such good intentions of taking the kids somewhere to get into the holiday festivities, but between Winter Track schedule (Phil coaches and JP plays) and the 3 Basketball teams (4 if you count Xander's weekly instructional practice), our time was extremely limited.  On top of all that normal business, our very sharing family passed around the stomach bug and it was like a row of the slowest falling dominoes ever.  Every child got the bug but were recovered in time to head out to a nearby park that decorates for Christmas.  While we were there, they were passing out hot cocoa and candy canes, and ST. Nick even showed up.  God is good and checked all my boxes.

18 Looks Back at 2018

It's so good for this mama's soul to look back over the year and give thanks for all of our blessings and adventures.  

So here's 18 photos to sum up 2018.

For Christmas stocking gifts, we gave each child a coupon for a date with Phil and I, and we spent January cashing in those coupons.  It was so fun!  We went to breakfast with the little boys, lunch with JP, dinner with Andrew and Eamon, and lunch with Maggie.  This is something we kept up with through the year...every kid had 2 or 3 dates with us.